Tuesday, May 11, 2010

How to Save the News - Magazine - The Atlantic

The cover story from the latest issue of The Atlantic, by James Fallows

Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.

Also check the link to Google chief economist Hal Varian’s “A Google-Eye View of the Newspaper Business”. Excerpt from that (2010/03/09) presentation: